"You're going out therVln annoying, mannered, not that great-looking girl But you're going to come back an indie queen. " . story; or something like that. '1\dam and Eve, the same old rubbish." Ninàs Qyaker teaching had not put much emphasis on Adam and Eve, so when she got home she took out the King J ames Bible and read the story all the way through. She was delighted by the majestic progress of those first six days-the sep- arating of the waters and the installation of the sun and moon and the appearance of the things that creep upon the earth and the fowl of the air, and so on. "This is beautiful," she said. "It's great poeny People should read it." He said that it was no better and no worse than any of the whole parcel of creation myths that had sprung up in all corners of the earth and that he was sick and tired of hearing about how beautiful It was, and about the poeny " Th ' L " h . d " Th at s a smOKe screen, e Sill. ey don't give a piss in a pot about the poeny" Nina laughed. "Comers of the earth," she said. "What kind of talk is that for a scientist? I bet it's out of the Bible." She would take a chance, once in a while, and tease him on this subject. Though she was care:ful not to go too far. N ow and then, she found pampWets in the mail. She didn't read them through, and for a while she thought that everybody must be getting them, 70 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8, 2001 . along with the junk mail offering trop- ical holidays and other gaudy windfalls. Then she found out that Lewis was getting the same material at school- "creationist propaganda" -left on his desk or stuffed into his pigeonhole in the office. "The kids have access to my desk, but who the hell is stuffing my mailbox in here?" he had asked the principal. The principal said that he couldn't figure it out; he was getting it, too. Lewis mentioned the names of a couple of teachers on the staff: a couple of "crypto- Christians," as he called them, and the principal said that it wasn't worth getting your shirt in a knot about-you could al- ways throw it away. There were questions in class. Of course, there always had been. You could count on it, Lewis said. Some little sickly saint of a girl or a smart-arse of either sex trying to throw a mon- key wrench into evolution. Lewis had his tried-and-true ways of dealing with this. He told the disrupters that if they wanted the religious interpre- tation of the world's history there was the Christian Separate School in the next town, which they were welcome to attend. Qyestions becoming more frequent, he added that there were buses to take them there and that they could collect their books and depart this day and hour, if they had a mind to. The students were taking a new tack, these days. "It's not that we necessarily want the religious view, sir. It's just that we wonder why you don't give it equal . " tIme. Lewis let himself be drawn into argument. "It's because I am here to teach you science, not religion." That was what he said he had said. There were those who reported him as saying, "Because I am not here to teach you crap." And indeed, indeed, said Lewis, after the fourth or fifth inter- ruption, the posing of the question in whatever slightly different way ("Do you think it hurts us to hear the other side of the story? If we get taught athe- ism, isn't that sort of like teaching us some kind of religion?"), the word might have escaped his lips and under such provocation he did not apologize for it. "I happen to be the boss in this class- room, and I decide what will be taught." "I thought God was the boss, sir." There were expulsions from the room. Parents arrived to speak to the principal. Or they may have intended to speak to Lewis, but the principal made sure that that did not happen. Lewis heard about these interviews only later, from remarks passed, more or less jok- ingly, in the staff room. "You don't need to worry about it," said the principal-his name was Paul Gibbings, and he was a few years youn- ger than Lewis. "They just need to feel that they're being listened to. Need a bit of jollying along." "I'd have jollied them," Lewis said. "Yeah. That's not quite the jollying I had in mind." "There should be a sign: 'No dogs or parents on the premises.' " "Something to that," Paul Gibbings said, sighing amiably. "But I suppose they've got their rights." Letters started to appear in the local paper. One every couple of weeks, . d " c d P " " Ch . slgne oncerne arent or rIS- tian Taxpayer" or "Where Do We Go From Here?" They were well written, neatly paragraphed, competently ar- gued, as if they might all have come from one delegated hand They made